Unbearable Fruit: Linea Negra photographs, Mother Mold monuments from the Mama Spa Botanica
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer solo show
Bronx River Art Center
1087 East Tremont Ave Bronx, NY 10460
October 30 - December 12 2021
Curated by Dr. Taylor Bradley
Bronx River Art Center (BRAC) is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Quipucamayoc (urban designer, culture keeper, community organizer) artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer. The social-practice project, titled Mother Mold Project & Mama Spa Botánica, documents the birthing justice crisis in American BIPOC communities through sculpture, photography, and tableau installation. The exhibition will be on view from October 30 - December 11, 2021.
Rodriguez Meyer’s multi-generational and multi-national collaborative project confronts the rising rate of infant and maternal mortality in the Americas. As Mama Spa Botánica collaborator Doula Nicky Dawkins characterized the crisis, “hospitals do to Black and Brown women on the birthing bed what cops do to our men on the street.” By celebrating ancestral survival traditions in birthing-justice childbirth seminars, sculpture, and photography, the work memorializes people and rituals that have been subjugated and undermined in colonial mythologies. The exhibition encompasses immersive multimedia maternity tableaux of the photographic series, Linea Negra (2008-ongoing) and the sculpture series, Mother Molds (2020-ongoing) which Rodriguez Meyer produced from Mama Spa Botánica workshops.
Together, the sculptures and photographs represent Rodriguez Meyer’s cultural translation of the legacy of institutionalized and biological violence in the artist’s biographical community. Built with a maternal healing recipe and identity construction materials, the Mother Mold sculptures formalize the intersections between the maternal health crisis and climate change. The cumulative impact of land seizures and development projects, as well as the accelerated extraction of natural resources in the last five hundred years has forced millions in the Global South to abandon millinery traditions for military medicine. In response, Rodriguez Meyer builds monuments to mixed motherhood that present intimate ephemera and environmental waste as powerful monuments of survival. The sculptures are bound by biological and biographical family remains; bathed in resin, painted with fruit, housed in palm or corn husks, insulated by hair, tucked in sea debris, and braided with palm fronds.
To create the Linea Negra photographs, Rodriguez Meyer draws on sacred signifiers of motherhood across spiritual traditions that position maternal figures in radiant abundance while delineating the social and political risks that melanated people face in our ranked society. The resulting ritual tableaux present crowning images of Black and Indigenous families.
The Bronx River Art Center will serve as a threshold for participants to celebrate life-cycle traditions across the Americas and Caribbean during Hispanic Heritage Month, Dia de Los Muertos, and Interdependence Day. Transforming the gallery into a center for reproductive reparations, Rodriguez Meyer will invite maternal care workers, pregnant people, and their families to participate in a 2-hour Mama Spa Botánica. Working one-on-one with Black and Indigenous expectant mothers, the artist documents their pregnancies in Mother Mold sculptures and Linea Negra photographs as they prepare for their birthing experience with confidence.
By facilitating radical communion between parent and child, parent and self, birth-worker and patients, Rodriguez Meyer grounds her project in community and caregiving, nurturing the raw and tender psychic networks of procreation. Moreover, as a community-building tool, and a means of empowerment, the Mother Mold Project & Mama Spa Botánica workshops share Indigenous resistance wisdom to navigate and survive the maternal health crisis and refigure the migratory stigmas of climate change.
Mama Spa Botánica workshops are dignity-training tallers that offer decolonial childbirth classes and agency building art therapy for procreative BIPOC and their families. The workshops are taught by reproductive health workers such as doulas, midwives, healers, and birthing justice leaders who help deliver tools to transgress medical violence in the colonial US.
Linea Negra is the melanin line that appears during gestation, most prominently for women of color. As the human’s first mark on the procreative body, la linea negra signifies the first sign of our creative humanity. Rodriguez Meyer’s photographic series, La Linea Negra, combines vernacular images of fertility with ancestral consciousness to build methods of resistance against institutional trauma. The project documents the inception of gender, power, and race structures embedded in the cultural fabric of the colonial US to build visibility around economic, environmental, and reproductive uncertainty for the most vulnerable members of the birthing community. Rodriguez Meyer deconstructs the status of motherhood as a ranked, reproductive product into a social-monumental form of dignified personhood in American civic life.
Mother Mold sculptures are maternal monuments created by, of, and for pregnant people. The artist casts her Black and Brown birthing community within their own life force to create sculptures that resonate with the complex beauty and terror of creating life and giving birth in America. Drawing on sculptural technologies developed in Indigenous and revolutionary societies, Rodriguez Meyer’s references range from mummification in ancient Egyptian, pre-Columbian Andean, and Incan civilizations to Death Masks in the French Revolution.
https://www.bronxriverart.org/gallery-past-detail?recordID=122
